Clinton Green & Allanah Stewart: Yarrow and Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver: Steady State [Shame File Music]. Two more collaborations from tireless improvisor/innovator/label mogul Green. Yarrow collects two outdoor improvisations with Allanah Stewart from early 2023, using found objects, derelict electrical goods and homemade doodads of various kinds. Both live recordings are further demonstrations that authenticity as an aesthetic value is not enough by itself. There is murk, as promised in the blurb. The crunchy, grungy vérité of the performance is swathed with the grey grot that pervades all recordings made in suburban backyards, which casts a pall over the proceedings. Green and Stewart are working with recondite instruments and at times are audibly stuck trying to make something happen. It’s realism with all the dull bits left in, for all the good that does. My attention wandered and I suspect I would have been even more distracted at the event itself, seeing someone else’s backyard. Green’s work with Oliver on Steady State is more explicably musical, continuing from their earlier collaboration The Interstices Of These Epidemics. In the first of two pieces, Oliver solos on a piano in a way that’s both floaty and earthy at once, while Green fills in an atmospheric wash of stuck and bowed gongs. As with the following track, the duo improvisation is greater than the sum of its parts. For the second piece, Oliver switches to banjo, employing the instrument’s vinegary sound to complement the gongs in often confounding ways. Somewhat ambient, somewhat exotic, but always prickly enough to keep you alert, exploring sounds to hugely effective ends.
Eamon Sprod: FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID [Aposiopèse]. There seems to be a crucial difference in the way that Australian musicians handle field recordings, compared to European counterparts. The British, for example, always seem to be searching for something essential in the sounds, much like in their frequent reversions to folk music. Australian field recordists seem no less earnest, but are always ambivalent about how much they can claim as authenticity. This can manifest itself in various ways; in the case of Eamon Sprod, FOIL VOID JOIN AVOID is one of the most comprehensive, oblique, and sophisticated statements of that ambivalence. Sprod, who’s previously recorded under the name Tarab, works with field recordings and the sounds of non-musical objects. With this new work, about a hundred minutes long, he has successfully produced an example of anti-field recordings, in which source, context and place are irrelevant. Each section is marked by fast cutting, with an emphasis on percussive effects created by short interruptions, strung together with empty moments of almost inaudible hum and, between sections, silences of arbitrary duration. It resembles some works by Luciano Maggiore, in that it all sounds deliberately incoherent on first listen, but on the second time around you can hear it’s cannily composed: I guess no coincidence that the two of them have discussed these very issues in their music (link is PDF). The large scale and employment of punctuated disinterest creates an overall impression of an elusive but compelling argument being made. The sounds could be nondescript in themselves but gain force through rapid juxtapositions which highlight contrasts; then again, the selection of sounds also turns out to be vast, suprisingly detailed and richly coloured. Further listening reveals compositional tension as elements move back and forth between the brief and the continuous, suggesting other layers that are yet to be discovered.
Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney: Lampworking [Kuyin]. Streb and Feeney were both part of Tasting Menu, reviewed here before. Improvisations on objects was the M.O. then, with the twist of using the recording space as an additional percussion instrument to be struck and scraped. Lampworking takes these basic ideas and develops them further, much to the better. Both pieces on the album are recorded live in a gallery, as part of an installation. Recordings of objects are played through spatialised speakers, sometimes filtered through other resonant objects, and then re-recorded in space with live performances on another set of objects. Complex means for simple materials lead to engagingly textured, site-specific soundscapes while still remaining open to alternate dimensions through the pre-recorded material. “Pasadena” adds rubbed wineglasses for musical drones draped over the percussion, “Chinatown” is more slippery, with sustained ambient resonances emerging during the middle sections before the intrusion of bass percussion from field recordings of fireworks.
Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Allanah Stewart, Barnaby Oliver, Cassia Streb, Clinton Green, Eamon Sprod, Tarab, Tim Feeney
No Comments »
Genuine improvised duets
Sunday 14 March 2021
At a time when just getting two people into a room to play together is a dimly-remembered luxury, it’s nice to hear again the strange interactions that happen during an improvised duet. The three recordings here all took place before 2020’s pandemic and the attendant lockdowns and general curtailment of simple pleasures. It’s also nice to remember that austere doesn’t have to be synonymous with meagre. The Interstices Of These Epidemics is the result of 18 months’ preparation by Clinton Green and Barnaby Oliver, in which the two of them worked with “a restricted palette of gestures and sound sources” until they created this mesmerising pair of improvisations. Green plays bowed metal bowls, producing distinctively complex, friable drones that teem with ambiguous harmonics. It’s a sound that can easily be overused but Green plays with steadfast restraint, letting inadvertent variations come of their own accord. In the first track, he’s joined by Oliver on violin, the two of them merging into what sounds like a prepared string quartet playing a blurred, nebulous chorale. For the second, Oliver switches to piano and Green’s drones become a backdrop for a plaintive series of ostinatos. The wistful sentimentality of the chords and halting rhythm is tempered by Oliver’s refusal to be led into anything beyond the most minute expressive gestures. This is released on Green’s Shame File Music, a long-running Melbourne label that mixes up new music with reissues of historic recordings of the Australian avant-garde.
This came out a while back and I didn’t pay close attention because it seemed like more lowkey improvisation which is all just swell but after a while you’ve heard too much of it. Turns out it’s way better than that. The two tracks on Iteration were improvisations at a live gig by Lucio Capece and Werner Dafeldecker, the former on reeds and battery-powered feedback, the latter on double bass. As with Green and Oliver, the two musicians do not play as one instrument but nevertheless play with a single mind in a shared, multicoloured voice. In the first track, Capece’s bass clarinet forms the focus, with Dafeldecker’s bass adding colouration and echoes, each instrument seeking out a common register. For the second, the string instrument’s more complex textures become figuration against higher, more pure tones traded between slide saxophone and feedback until the bass harmonics threaten to engulf them. Both works are unhurried, with a clean conception of form and pacing that slows down time while still feeling like a worked-out composition.
David Grubbs and Ryley Walker first played together as a duet on “a broiling night at a neighborhood bar” in New York in summer 2019. The gig is now released as Fight or Flight Simulator on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku download label. The two electric guitars intertwine around some gently paced but steady chords and picking patterns, then gradually lead each other into more fraught terrain. Even as there is some Sturm und Drang during the 25-minute piece, a regular pulse is heard or implied throughout, which both Grubbs and Walker use to pull back and foreground the subtle complexity found in the interplay of their instruments, rather than try to dazzle the punters with histrionics. It’s hard to be objective listening to this because I can’t but feel sad about it. It makes me wish I was in another place, or another time; somewhere it isn’t still winter, where there are bars and gigs, somewhere that isn’t London, or even Europe, somewhere that electric guitars still matter, a place where I’m not so old.
